Consequently, some leading avant-garde artists, including Zhang, Yue and Fang Lijun, to name just a few, are said to have accumulated great wealth. Fang, best known for his red, bald figures, now employs numerous assistants in a large studio and owns six restaurants in Beijing. “What we have now is export art for the export market,” says Lam, who suggests that Chinese artists need to follow their own ideas and not be subjugated to the demands of the marketplace.

“This new wealth can be a trap,” says Melissa Chiu, director of the museum at New York’s Asia Society. “Some artists feel forced to reproduce the work from their early days. For others, success has allowed them to be more ambitious, to do all the work they always dreamed of,” she says.

No one is more pleased about the successes of Chinese contemporary artists than Ethan Cohen. A curator of the March–April 2007 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art special project “We are Your Future” and director of Ethan Cohen Fine Arts gallery in New York, he is gratified that Chinese contemporary artists are at long last being recognized both in this country and overseas. Unlike 10 years ago, he says, “Chinese artists are invited to participate in each Documenta and almost every biennale worldwide.” However, he warns, “there is a danger that the explosion of interest in the market could lead to excessive speculation based on short-term hopes for profit.” According to Cohen, in this environment it is critical to focus on those artists who are able to produce truly significant work that will endure in market value and aesthetic satisfaction.
 
Christopher Phillips of the International Center of Photography in New York takes a dim view of the current explosion of Chinese art. “I have never seen such a big, booming, blossoming bubble as is underway today, and at some point it will end,” he says. “You never know what the trigger will be. It’s clearly not sustainable and not good for the artists.”
 
Although many experts like Phillips are forthright about their concerns and question the long-term value of contemporary Chinese art, others, like New York collectors Larry Warsh and Sue Stoffel, are far more positive. What has attracted them to this work is that it is “fresh, new, exhilarating as well as historically important,” says Warsh, an early collector of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He also was an early admirer and collector of works by Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun and Ai Weiwei, and has at least a dozen wood sculptures by Wang Keping. “My plan is to build an important historical collection of the Chinese artists from the post-1989 era to the present,” says Walsh. “That level of energy and quality will never happen again in the same way.”

Although Sue Stoffel collects in various media, she is primarily interested in all aspects of contemporary Chinese photography—straight, computer-generated and digitally manipulated work. “What I have found is that the artists have excellent academic training, what they choose to do with that training is extraordinary,” she says. “What appeals to me is the way the artists are trying to make sense of their own personal histories.”
 
The post-1989 work that garnered such high prices in Hong Kong and elsewhere mainly falls into three categories. Political Pop tends to have bold outlines, bright colors and collage effects with easily accessible political commentary. One protagonist of this style is Li Shan, whose “Rouge Series, No. 8” features a black-and-white Mao painted against a flat red background with a pink flower dangling from his lips. A second style is Cynical Realism, work that portrays mostly human figures, often frozen in pain or horror, exemplified by Zhang’s “Bloodline” series. A third, Gaudy Art, is a Chinese version of kitsch, in response to Western consumer culture’s effect on nouveau-riche Chinese. A typical example is Xu Yihui’s porcelain sculpture “Money” a ceramic work that represents a $100 bill nestled on a bed of too-bright red roses.